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Presidents Love Pork, Too

By JOHN HUDAK

July 20, 2014

When people hear the term “pork barrel politics,” they think of Congress, and for good reason. Representatives and senators rushing to include earmarks in bills, striving for a place on the Appropriations committees or demanding favors from leadership in return for votes is a legislative tradition — one with roots deep in the history of the republic.

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Broadly, pork barrel politics is the practice whereby elected officials use the powers of their office to secure government funds for their constituencies. It has its origins in Article I of the U.S. Constitution, which stipulates that “no money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by Law.” A highway here, a military installation there, and soon, legislators have a record of accomplishment to show voters.

What is less known and often overlooked, however, is that legislators don’t just battle with other legislators for their share of the federal pie; they’re also battling the White House. Our presidents are just as likely as Congress to chase federal funds for their own interests. In the research I did for my book on the subject, Presidential Pork: White House Influence Over the Distribution of Federal Grants, using statistical analysis to examine millions of individual federal grant allocations, I discovered that not only do swing states receive significantly more federal grants and federal grant dollars than do nonswing states, this practice picks up ahead of presidential elections.

It’s hard to identify presidential pork, as need across all 50 states is substantial and funding flows to all of them. But there are definitely funding decisions that raise eyebrows. Here’s one: Earlier this year, the White House and the Department of Agriculture announced the creation of Regional Climate Hubs to study the effects of climate change across the country. The department divided the the United States into seven regions and assigned each its own hub. Five of the seven regions contained at least one state that’s commonly competitive in presidential elections: Iowa, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Colorado and New Mexico. And in each of those five regions, the swing state received the hub. An additional “sub-hub” was designated in Michigan, another state often targeted by presidential campaigns.

Were climate hubs designated because of presidential electoral politics? The administration would surely provide explanations about how the locations of these hubs reflect the best talent on the topic in those regions, and yes, the institutions housing such hubs are high quality. However, the president has incentives to ensure that such federal institutions end up in swing states, and it’s easy enough for an administration official scanning through a list of high-quality hub applicants to help make that happen. As he moves through his second term, President Barack Obama is surely hoping that a Democratic president succeeds him, and it wouldn’t hurt to have climate hubs pumping hundreds of jobs and millions of research dollars into competitive states.

Is this unique to President Barack Obama? Not at all. In fact, my research found that Obama engages in this behavior far less than his immediate predecessors. During the Clinton and Bush administrations, the National Park Service directed twice as many grants to Pennsylvania than to California, even though California is four times larger than Pennsylvania and contains eight more nationally protected sites. One explanation could be that the protected sites in Pennsylvania had more capital needs than larger national parks in California. Another is that Pennsylvania was one of the most targeted states — if not the most — in the 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2008 presidential elections.

During the Bush administration, the newly minted Power Plant Improvement Initiative and Clean Coal Power Initiative were in charge of allocating federal grants to advance energy policy. Many states received grants, but substantial sums of money flowed to key electoral battlegrounds Ohio, New Mexico, Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — including a massive $235 million grant to central Florida to study clean coal technology. Again, there could be a variety of reasons for these allocations, but was it a coincidence that Bush and his energy secretary launched several public events announcing these large swing-state grants — many in the weeks leading up to the 2004 presidential election? If it looks like pork and smells like pork …

Though my research goes back to only 1996, anecdotal evidence suggests that such behaviors occurred in Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration, through the distribution of federal funding associated with Great Society programs, and that planned communities as part of the New Deal were chosen in areas where President Franklin D. Roosevelt was looking to boost his electoral support. The practice is nothing new, and as the federal government’s role in society expanded and budgets has grown, so have the opportunities for presidential pork.

Interestingly, though, it turns out that where presidential power is weakest — in agencies whose leadership is composed of a higher percentage of civil servants relative to appointees, such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and in agencies that have budget autonomy and whose appointees serve fixed terms that can span multiple presidencies, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities — presidential pork barrel spending is limited. However, reforming all federal agencies to be less political in nature would be a substantial legislative lift — the most dramatic government reorganization in American history. Not to mention the negative political consequences it would have for both Congress and the president. In short, it won’t happen. The practice, however unfair, is here to stay. If you don’t like it, you can always move to a swing state.